Question: People are often afraid of practices like meditation, which are not prescribed by their own religion. Why is this?

Sri Chinmoy: In the West, especially, prayer is given much more importance than meditation. So some people feel that if they meditate instead of praying, they are being disloyal to their religious beliefs. Also, many people are not accustomed to meditating, whereas all along they have been praying. Anything that is new to our system, to our mind and to our understanding creates a kind of conscious or unconscious fear in us.

From:Sri Chinmoy,My meditation-service at the United Nations for twenty-five years, Agni Press, 1995
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/mun